Sonic Bio-Mutants in Space!

Description

Each of you work for a company who was fortunate enough to get a handful of its genetically altered plant samples included on the space shuttle, to examine how they fare in a zero gravity environment while being exposed to a cycle of varying harmonic frequencies. Unfortunately something has gone wrong with the shuttle and it is required to return to Earth a full 4 days early! At this point there are only so many hours left to conclude as many of your experiments as you can.

All of the experiments, yours and all of the experiments owned by other companies as well, are maintained within a single grid, cared for by an operator with the assistance of a robotic arm. There is not enough time to complete all of the experiments, so NASA has decided to open up the bidding, and make some extra cash.

You and the other companies try to outbid each other to gain favor with NASA, and thus get the results from your precious experiments. To complicate matters, each experiment has an optimal time to be "harvested" during the harmonic cycle. Harvest early or late, and the results are less than ideal, although any results are still better than none.

An entry in the GoodPortsmanship contest. Based on the game Holiday by Sid Sackson.

Rules

http://www.ludism.org/attachments/ppwiki/SonicBioMutants.pdf

Reviews & Comments

Sonic Bio-Mutants in Space!, a port of Holiday, by Jonathan Dietrich. First, a tip of the hat to the author for good taste in choosing a game to port: the forgotten classic Holiday, by Sid Sackson. The way the author ported the world-travel mechanic to rook-like constraint on a rectangular grid is ingenious and fascinating. However, it's also a little murky. Whereas Holiday has incredible clarity -- you always know which exotic location you want to jet to next -- Bio-Mutants often left players hemming and hawing. The ending is also somewhat anticlimactic and drags a bit. However, everyone who played it agreed that it had depth, and repeated play would probably be rewarded.

CategoryGame CategoryPortedGame ThemeSpaceAndTechnologyCategory